The Collateral Damage of Climate Migration

Story by Andrew Mambondiyani

On the steep slopes of Zimbabwe’s lush Eastern Highlands, newly built homes—mostly grass-thatch, pole, and mud dwellings—scatter the rugged terrain. These houses were built by tens of thousands of small-scale farmers who, driven by crippling droughts in Zimbabwe’s lower elevations, have migrated to the Eastern Highlands in search of fertile soil, fresh water, and pasture for their livestock.

Since the 1960s, the average temperature in Zimbabwe has risen by about 1 degree Celsius (2 degrees Fahrenheit), while the average rainfall has decreased by about 20 percent. Droughts are becoming evermore frequent, too. Crop-decimating droughts used to hit roughly once per decade; they now strike once every three years. These droughts ravage the livelihoods of Zimbabweans, up to 70 percent of whom work in agriculture. Yet the Eastern Highlands, which stretches nearly 300 kilometers along the border with Mozambique, still boasts a glut of perennial rivers, heavy rainfall, dense vegetation, foggy mountain peaks, and a plethora of species.

While the politics and policies of international migration tend to make headlines, existing scientific evidence suggests that when it’s the climate forcing people to move, they tend to stick within their national borders. In 2018, the World Bank warned that without urgent global and national climate action, including cutting greenhouse gas emissions, more than 140 million people in sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia, and Central America will likely migrate within their own countries by the year 2050.

In recent research, Roman Hoffmann, who heads the migration and sustainable development research group at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis in Austria, used census records to show that drought and aridification has already led to increased internal migration, especially in particularly dry places—like parts of Zimbabwe.

“This area is our only hope,” says Lloyd Gweshengwe, a farmer who migrated to the Eastern Highlands a few years ago and whose home now sits on a treacherous mountainside overlooking a small river. “It’s still good for farming. Water is plenty, and the soils are good,” he adds.

“This year, I had a very good harvest of maize. It’s enough to feed my family until the next harvest. I might even sell the surplus,” he says.

Gweshengwe’s story is one of many. In their 2022 study of climate migrants to Zimbabwe’s Eastern Highlands, Trymore Maganga and Cathy Conrad Suso from Saint Mary’s University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, write that “most households in the small-scale farming regions are resorting to either short- or long-term migration to areas that offer them food security.”

But the influx of climate migrants to Zimbabwe’s Eastern Highlands is prompting concern from the Zimbabwean government, environmental groups, and timber companies. These climate migrants, tarred as squatters or illegal settlers by local environmentalists, are clearing large swaths of forests for croplands. They’re clogging rivers and wetlands with cut trees, and transforming once-lush forests into broken mosaics of maize and other crops.

Though official studies are scarce, Bernard Chiketo, a renowned Zimbabwean journalist and photographer, has been documenting how human communities and wildlife are changing with the influx of people.

“These climate migrants in the Eastern Highlands just want to survive; they have no other options. Some migrants are claiming that the Eastern Highlands is their ancestral land. They say they were evicted from this area long back by white colonial settlers,” Chiketo says.

But Chiketo, who prides himself on knowing virtually everything worth knowing about the biogeography of the Eastern Highlands—from its flora and fauna to wetlands and rivers—is still worried about the growing human population. The most recent official government estimate of the number of migrants to the region—20,000 people—is from 2015. Anecdotal evidence, however, points to a ballooning population of climate migrants moving to the Eastern Highlands.

“Some migrants,” Chiketo says, “are now occupying the fragile montane grasslands found in the Eastern Highlands. They are now pushing wild animals out of the area. By the way, this is the only place in Zimbabwe where you can find samango monkeys. The monkeys’ habitat is shrinking, and they are now in conflict with other primates, like baboons.”

The samango monkey’s distinctive call—a low-pitched boom often heard at dawn or dusk—is slowly disappearing from the Eastern Highland’s soundscape, Chiketo says. Blue swallows, a migratory bird that breeds in the Eastern Highlands, are also under serious threat. Of the roughly 8,000 blue swallows thought to exist worldwide, roughly a quarter breed in Zimbabwe’s Eastern Highlands. At the same time, blue duikers, bushbucks, civets, and rare Marshall’s pygmy chameleons are also disappearing, as are various species of frogs, moths, and butterflies. Palm-nut vultures, meanwhile, have already been missing from the landscape for several years.

Farai Maguwu, a climate change expert and director of the Centre for Natural Resource Governance, a Zimbabwe-based NGO, says that though people are moving out of necessity, the Zimbabwe government “must regulate such movements, as they will certainly result in the weakening of ecosystems and [in] social conflicts.”

Gweshengwe, for his part, says the government should not remove him and the other settlers. Instead, he adds, the government should formalize the settlements and provide the migrants with better roads, health centers, schools, and other amenities. After all, if a warmer climate is here to stay, so might be the climate migrants in the Eastern Highlands.